Gardening with Chickens: Plans and Plants for You and Your Hens by Lisa Steele

I received a free copy of Gardening with Chickens. All purchase links are affiliate links. If you make a purchase through one I receive a small commission which helps to keep the Farm cats in catnip toys.

About the Book:

Join Lisa Steele, chicken-keeper extraordinaire and founder of Fresh Eggs Daily, on a unique journey through the garden. Start by planning your garden and learning strategies and tips for keeping your plants safe while they grow. Plant with purpose, choosing from a dozen plans for theme gardens such as Orange Egg Yolks or Nesting Box Herbs. Or choose a design that’s filled with edibles – sharing the bounty with your family and your feathered friends. Then comes the fun part: enjoy the harvest, even let the chickens graze!

Lisa’s friendly writing, together with inspirational photos and illustrations, will have you rolling up your sleeves and reaching for your gardening tools. Lisa also covers a range of topics just for chicken-keepers, including:

– Chickens and composting

– Using chickens to aerate and till

– Coop window boxes

– Plants to avoid when you have chickens

– Lists of the most valuable crops and herbs

– Advice on how to harvest and use many of the plants

– And much more!

Whether you’re an experienced chicken keeper, master gardener, or just getting into these two wonderful hobbies, Gardening with Chickens is an indispensable guide for a harmonious homestead.

About the Author:

Lisa Steele is a fifth-generation chicken keeper who has been around chickens most of her life, so it’s no surprise she has made her name raising her own backyard flock and sharing her farming adventures. Lisa is also an aspiring herbalist and avid gardener who shares tips and advice on both her award-winning Fresh Eggs Daily blog and Facebook page of the same name. She holds a Maine Master Gardener certification and her popular website has been named one of Better Homes & Gardens Top Ten Gardening Blogs.

A regular contributor to such publications as Backyard Poultry, Hobby Farm, and Chickens magazine, as well as HGTVGardens.com and BHG.com, Lisa has become the most trusted voice in natural chicken keeping. She has appeared on P. Allen Smith’s radio and television programs, various local programs, and is currently hosting her own “chicken lifestyle” television show on Maine’s WPTX-TV. She is the author of Gardening with Chickens, Fresh Eggs Daily, and Duck Eggs Daily, and tours the country speaking and signing books at the Mother Earth News and Country Living fairs.

Lisa and her husband live on a small farm in Maine with a menagerie of chickens, ducks, dogs, and an indoor-outdoor barn cat. In her free time, she enjoys knitting socks, sipping herbal tea, and cooking and baking using fresh produce from the garden and fresh eggs from her coop.

My Opinion:

Anyone who has been following along with my life knows we have chickens here on the farm – and the Happy Ducks. One of the reasons we added the chickens other than the obvious, was because they ate so many bugs. We have an assortment of bugs here but the ones the chickens have been most effective with have been the grasshoppers. I have to admit it’s vastly entertaining to watch the chickens and the ducks chasing and catching them in the summer. Since we’ve had the fowl on the farm there has been far less grasshopper damage in the garden, so GO CHICKENS!

As the growing season progresses and the plants establish themselves we’ll let the birds into the garden to scratch and eat bugs. We can’t send them in too early or they will eat the seedlings. They are remarkable consumers of bugs though and you have to love an animal that helps in such a way. In addition we use their manure to help fertilize the garden, although it does have to sit and “cool” a bit before it can be used.

This book is an excellent resource for anyone wondering about how to start with chickens. It is full of gorgeous photos and very useful advice. The reader will learn, in a very easy to read way, just what they need to do to welcome chickens to their garden or small farm.

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City girl turned farm girl, Patty Woodland
shares her life and loves from a small
Montana farm. Drawing inspiration from
her garden, cats, and the
beautiful countryside,
Broken Teepee is a
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